Some of them include:

These are the icons that are commonly misunderstood:

#1 Email @ Sign

This can mean 2 different things. It can EITHER be a link to a contact (and I mean email) form OR it can be a link to the feed providing the option of email delivery. (I’ll explain in a moment.)

#2 Envelope Symbol

This can mean the same thing as the above.

Lately I’ve seen both symbols put together or an @ sign on a RSS sign (#3 image above). This can mean one of THREE options! Keep reading.

#3 RSS Symbol

Ironically, this is the easy one. This always means one thing – it is a feed link.

It will link to the site’s feed which is an easy-for-machines-to-digest version of the content. To our eyes, the RSS feed will look like jumbled English. That is why we usually use a “feed reader”. My favorite is Google Reader. Lots of users prefer their email client’s built-in reader, Bloglines or Newzcrawler, although there are literally 100′s of them.

Since most people don’t know how to use a feed reader, most of us offer our readers an easier way – Feedburner. Feedburner is a feed-gatherer (my word). It grabs our feed, and delivers it to our reader’s feedreader. So the flame symbol to the left is actually Feedburner’s logo. It is so popular that the icon is nearly always recognized.

Feed Via Email

Feedburner (and several other good feed ‘gatherers’) deliver the feeds to the reader’s email instead of a feedreader! This is perfect for those readers who want to stay up to date with you, but have no idea what a feedreader is, or couldn’t be bothered with one. What we serve them, is a feed delivered via email and is completely separate from a contact icon, or a newsletter.

Newsletters

So, to make matters interesting, we throw in the ‘newsletter’. These are intended to be different from feed emails. From a marketing standpoint, newsletters can serve an entirely different purpose. A newsletter can be the contact you have with those who do NOT follow your regular posts. And to be honest, given my time constraints, newsletters are where I often gather most of my information. My feed reader is so full of posts that its stopped counting.

Further Discussion

Now that you know what they all are, what do you prefer? And what do you offer on your site? Also, which feed ‘gatherer’ do you use, if any? Do you read blogs in a feed reader?

1.  Find an image of those RSS buttons. Here’s over 35 styles, each with 8 or more different colors and designs.  I’ll use one from my photobucket account.  You may use this one too if you like.

Once you have selected your image, you need to copy the location like this:

<img src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />

If you have one uploaded to your blog, go to your “manage” panel, and find the image in your media library.  Copy the url (location) from that image.

2.  Find the Address of YOUR feed. WordPress publishes several feeds for you.  They have their own names, and you can see where they are coded in the header of your blog (if you look under View Page Source).

If you are using the feedburner widget, and have a feedburner url, use that instead.  It will be:

www.feeds.feedburner.com/mommymotivation.

In your page source it will be something like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss/.

Or, if you are NOT using permalinks, like this:

www.mommymotivation.me/?feed=rss.

There are several options that you can use, and 3 or 4 different feeds to access.  Find more options on the wordpress manual, here.

3.  Put these two things together in a text widget. In your design admin tab, under “widgets” select the sidebar that you’d like it to appear in.  Then select the “text” widget on the left.  Open it up, enter a title and your feed details like this:

<div id=”rss” style=”text-align:center;”>

<img style=”border:none;” src=”http://i284.photobucket.com/albums/ll40/o2cathy/blog%20artwork/feed.png” alt=”button” />  <a href=”www.mommymotivation.me/feed/rss” title=”feed”>Subscribe to my Feed.</a>

(Replace the red text with the URL’s that you found in step 1 & 2.)

Sit back and revel in the fact that you did something nice for all your loyal fans today.

Cheers!